Anna Maria Schonleben was born in Nuremberg in 1760, orphaned at five, and married at nineteen to a notary named Zwanziger who drank himself to death and left her nothing. She was described by everyone who wrote about her as small, hunched, plain and desperate to be respected. She had two children, worked as a housekeeper, and by her forties was moving between posts in Bavaria looking for a widower to marry.
She took service on March 5, 1808, with a judge named Wolfgang Glaser at Rosendorf, who was separated from his wife. Zwanziger arranged a reconciliation, invited the wife to tea, and on August 26 Frau Glaser died in agony. Glaser did not marry her and she moved on. Writers of the period called her the German Brinvilliers, after the seventeenth-century French poisoner.
On September 25, 1808, she went to keep house for another judge, Grohmann, at Sanspareil, a man of thirty-eight in poor health whom she nursed devotedly between his relapses. He showed no interest in marrying her, and after eleven days of vomiting and abdominal pain he died on May 8, 1809; the death was put down to his long illness. She then worked for a magistrate named Gebhard, whose wife was expecting. The baby was born on May 13, 1809, and three days later Frau Gebhard fell ill; she died soon after. Zwanziger took over the running of the household and the care of the infant, and when the household began to suspect her she poisoned the servants and guests, and the baby, with arsenic in the food and in the salt, in doses meant to sicken rather than kill so that she could nurse them.
She was dismissed in September 1809. As she left she gave two maids coffee and the five-month-old baby milk and a biscuit, and within hours all three were violently ill. Gebhard had the kitchen salt analyzed by a chemist; it was full of arsenic, and at trial the salt barrel was found to hold thirty grains to every three pounds. It came out that Schönleben was only her maiden name and that she was the widow Zwanziger of Nuremberg. She was arrested there on October 16, 1809, with two more packets of arsenic on her, and in time admitted everything at length, saying that she had wanted a husband and a place, and that arsenic had been her truest friend. Doctors examining her recorded that she trembled with pleasure when the poisonings were described to her.
On October 23 Frau Glaser's body was exhumed at Rosendorf after fourteen months in the ground, so little decomposed that it had dried and hardened like a mummy, with the marks the doctors associated with arsenic. The bodies of Frau Gebhard and Grohmann were raised the next day. The account of the case that survives comes largely from the Bavarian jurist Anselm von Feuerbach, who included it in his collection of remarkable criminal trials. On July 7, 1811, the court at Bamberg convicted her of three murders and several attempts and sentenced her to be beheaded with the sword and her body broken on the wheel; the king confirmed the death sentence but struck out the wheel. She said before her death that it was probably as well she was to be executed, since she did not think she could have stopped. She was beheaded on September 17, 1811, aged fifty-one. Most accounts place the execution at Nuremberg; one gives Kulmbach.